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People whose sexual identities changed toward same-sex attraction in early adulthood reported more symptoms of depression in a nationwide survey than those whose sexual orientations did not change or changed in the opposite direction, according to a new study by a University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) sociologist.

Most people who meet a new acquaintance, or merely pass someone on the street, need only a glance to categorize that person as a particular race. But, sociologist Asia Friedman wondered, what can we learn about that automatic visual processing from people who are unable to see?

Friedman, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, set out to explore that question by interviewing 25 individuals who are blind. She will present her findings in a study at the 110th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

The transmission of party identification from parent to child is one of the most important components of political socialization in the United States. Research shows that children learn their party identification from their parents, and parents drive the learning process. The vast majority of studies thus treats children as passive recipients of information and assumes that parent-child concordance equals transmission. Rather than relying on a single pathway by which parents teach children, we propose an alternative view by focusing on children as active agents in their socialization.

Do police treat religious-based protest events differently than secular ones? Drawing on data from more than 15,000 protest events in the United States (1960 to 1995) and using quantitative methods, we find that law enforcement agents were less likely to show up at protests when general religious actors, actions, or organizations were present. Rather than reflecting privileged legitimacy, we find that this protective effect is explained by religious protesters’ use of less threatening tactics at events.

Multiple chronic conditions (i.e., multimorbidity) increase a person’s depressive symptoms more than having one chronic condition. Little is known regarding whether multimorbidity similarly increases the depressive symptoms of one’s spouse and whether this depends on type of condition, gender, or both spouses’ health status. Analysis of multiple waves of the Health and Retirement Study reveals husband’s number of chronic conditions is positively related to wife’s depressive symptoms when both spouses are chronically ill.

This paper proposes a theoretical framework and an empirical example of the relationship between the civic stratification of immigrants in the United States, and their access to healthcare. We use the 2007 Pew Hispanic Center/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Hispanic Healthcare Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. Latinos (N = 2,783 foreign-born respondents) and find that immigrants who are not citizens or legal permanent residents are significantly more likely to be excluded from care in both the United States and across borders.

Although both China and Russia have experienced several decades of market reform, initial evidence suggests that this structural change has compromised mental and physical health among the Russian population but not the Chinese population. Using data from the World Health Organization Study on Global AGEing and Adult Health (2007–2010), this study examines the factors associated with the disparity in depression between older adults in China and their Russian counterparts, all of whom experienced market transition in the prime of their lives (N = 10,896).

In this article, I share some thoughts about how we might extend the study of mental health inequalities by drawing from key insights in sociology and sociological social psychology about the nature of inequality and the processes through which it is produced, maintained, and resisted. I suggest several questions from sociological research on stratification that could help us understand unexpected patterns of mental health inequalities.

As a tribute to the body of work created by our late colleague Leonard I. Pearlin, this essay assesses how the evolution of the Stress Process Model, the centerpiece of his work, repeatedly reinvented sociological research on stress and mental health and explains why this model, therefore, possesses the potential to renew itself well into the future.